The Dynamic Force of Technological Progress - Essay Example

Introduction As early as the first decades of the 20th century, velo machines and films were a well-knownphenomenon and had a decisive impact on the artists of those days. The introduction of new technologies surpassed imagination and changed the artistic point of view, communication and human consciousness. The artists together with a broad audience believed in the world-creating synthesis of art and technology, which seemed to shape life in a pleasant way. With a continuing optimistic view of technology, they proclaimed that a new age, which was modernity, was dawning. The dynamic force of technological progress became a central motif and technology subsequently changed lifestyle and created a corresponding repertory of artistic forms (Mahla, para2). The invention of photography in 1837 by Louis Daguerre who was a French painter totally changed the relationship of the human being to the image. Photography confirmed the possibility of giving an objective likeness of reality using mechanical means. Furthermore, the development of industrial, architectural and specialized photography significantly reduced the previous extent for artistic tasks involving the most detailed and accurate reproduction of objects possible. Thereafter, photography and creative art were to compete or be in constant tension (Abele, para1). However, there were art critics such as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Courbet among others who despised photography as being a product of industry. Charles Baudelaire felt that it provided a picture of reality, which lacked the spiritual momentum that comes from the imagination. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, painter Gustave Courbet, who although recognised photography as a useful aid in depicting motifs, illustrated photography as only a copy of reality and painting as concrete reality by giving his paintings a physical consistency which photography could not attain by means of the thickness with which he applied colour and the intensity of his palette. Inspired by technological progress in electricity, optics and photography, other artists and in particular the Impressionists became convinced that one could not recognise the truth of an object in photographic reproductions. Instead, they argued that it had to be broken down into its individual parts, portraying its relationship to the particular surrounding (Abele, para5). In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the Second Industrial Revolution that took place in the fields of chemicals, steel, electricity and oil provided the foundation for developments in plastics, building construction, machinery and automobile manufacturing and paved the way for the invention of electric light, electric streetcar, the radio and telephone. Science promised a world where humans could begin to create their own environment and the new era prospect filled artists and designers with excitement. However, artists with vision predicted that unless artists were up to the task of creating new designs and forms appropriate for the machine age, there was a danger since a synthetic world could easily devolve into an industrial wasteland of entirely functional objects. They made claims that designers were the only ones who had the capacity to conserve beauty in an era when industrialization and mass production began to substitute nature (Apatoff, para2). In addition, these visionary artists predicted that a slow but sure decline of the spirit of revolt would follow industrial revolution. The fact that only a few new ideas appeared among the younger artists made this phenomenon predictable. The young artists followed along the paths beaten out by their predecessors by trying to improve what their predecessors had already done in spite of there being nothing as perfection in art. This led to a creative lull, which occurs when artists of a period are satisfied with picking up work of a predecessor at the point where he dropped and attempting to continue with it. In fact, art is not a question of progress but it results from a succession of individuals expressing themselves (Duchamp, para1). Societal changes also prompted a greater consciousness of and interest in modernity. This resulted in the development of modernism in art in the second half of the nineteenth century where modernist artists sought to capture the images and emotional responses of their age while also exposing the premises of art itself to critical examination. Realism and Impressionism were the two major modernist art movements of the later nineteenth century when modernism led to the development of the avant-garde. These were artists whose work ardently rejected the past and contravened the boundaries of conventional artistic practice. They rejected the classical, academic or traditional art forms, adopted a decisive stand toward their respective media and produced art that was exceptionally subversive. They also explored the premises and formal qualities of sculpture, painting or other media. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the avant-garde included the Cubists, Fauves and Dada artists. Artnet Worldwide Corporation records that there is a close connection between nihilism and spiritualism, which emerged in the avant-garde art of the twentieth centurys second decade. The two great innovations of the decade are Dadaism and abstract art and they seem to have nothing in common. Abstract art is fraught with spiritual aspirations that make it appear to be more than art. On the other hand, Dadaism is nihilistic to the extent that it does not appear to be art, or else is art only in an ironic sense. It was a way of avoiding influence from one’s immediate environment or a metaphysical attitude intimately and consciously involved with literature. Some artists thought of it as Novelty Art and then as anti-art. In spiritual abstract art, there is a strong streak of nihilism or an anarchistic alienation while in Dadaism, there is a certain reluctant and ironic spirituality underneath its hostility that often seems like a calculated acting out or a pose. In its protest and struggle against the long reign of materialism, Kandinsky (1911) who was an optimist of abstract art declared that pure abstract art is one of the most powerful agents of spiritual life. In disgust of Dadaism, the poet Tristan Tzara (1918) argued that Dada Meant Nothing, its motive was destructive and that every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation is Dada. In his rabid pessimism, he trashed Cubism and added that Dada was a design to cube money and that it wants nothing and is doing something to make the public understand nothing. He also declared that apart from nothing, Dada offered the abolition of logic and its replacement by spontaneity and that Dadaists would come to nothing, which was absurd. Emily Hennings, a nightclub entertainer, together with Hugo Ball, a poet and philosopher officially began Dadaism with the founding in Zurich of the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916. In one example of their spontaneity, Huelsenbeck played beat on a drum while Ball played the piano. Hans Richter, a Dada painter and historian, argued that whether Dadas goal was pro-art, non-art or anti-art, any of its movements was an essential function in devising and inducing of scandal (Kuspit, para2). Dadaists perceived the word as chaotic, dissonant and irreproducible and believed that they could no longer cover the world in a challenging consecutive central-perspective and total way. Spontaneity therefore did not only mean offending the public and disturbing the peace but it also meant rebellion against social, political and artistic propriety and authority where entertainment meant transgression, with decorum replacing confrontation. Further, Calter argues that the best works of art have Expression, Fantasy, and Abstraction and that without feeling we are unmoved, without imagination, we are bored and without order, we see chaos. Although Abstract art and Dadaism are indisputably different, they were opposite sides of the same artistic coin. Both brought the decadent 19th-century Symbolism into the twentieth century and modernized it as it were. Abstract art apotheosized its aesthetic mysticism with sublime extremity while Dadaism carried nihilistic disgust of Symbolism with the modern world to an aggressive extreme by adding intellectual and artistic violence to it thereby subverting it. In the first half of the twentieth century, concurrently and autonomous of locality, the international avant-garde opened up the avoided topics of technology. It related effects of industrial revolution and daily life by representing light, velocity and noise. The artistic reproduction of dynamic force equivalent to film gained critical significance in Italian futurist painting and Chronophotography influenced Cinematism in painting. The interaction of art and technology became visible in Russian art from 1910. Mahla points out that architects, constructors and artists who demand art in life, in technology and in production embarked upon an unknown endeavour to employ their activities for the development of a new exemplary society. The Russian revolution stands as one of the absolute epochs of the twentieth century at the threshold of the industrial age. For Russian futurists, aircraft and aviation were symbols of advancement in the world with one of the leading characters of the opera, Victory Over the Sun, being an Aviator. Abele asserts that industrial society and machines provoked new concepts of creativity. Artists found dynamic motion in daily life such as a crowd in the street entering a house, the acceleration of a car or the dynamism (simultaneity of absolute and relative motion) of a dog on a leash. This enabled them to find the authentic form and in turn helped the audience to test the truth of a picture. Artists such as Boccione declared simultaneity to be the basic category of futuristic art. Twentieth-Century Intellectual Developments or new discoveries and new ways of thinking in diverse fields forced people to adjust how they understood their worlds. Changes in the art world also occurred when artists responded in various ways to the upheaval of the early twentieth century. These changes greatly influenced artistic developments with the avant-garde, which continued to challenge traditional notions about art and its relation to society becoming a major force particularly in the approval of machine aesthetic. According to Dee, the machine is the single most defining entity of the twentieth century with its role being central at the turn of the century. She considers this century as the dawn of the modern age aided by the energy and productivity of the machine. Machine aesthetic is a term applied to the perception of the machine as a source of beauty. This perception was principally imperative in the development of art and design in North America and Europe in the 20th century. However, one can be justified to argue that the genesis of the machine aesthetic lie in the 19th century, although few 19th-century writers, designers or architects were willing to view machines as in themselves prospective sources of beauty. Aesthetic understanding involves an experience of art in which that work is the utterly present for each meticulous present and at the same time holds its word in readiness for every future (Lambert, para1). Writers such as John Ruskin stressed the close affinity between organic forms particularly in decorative ornament and aesthetic pleasure; a wide array of modern machines from locomotives to kitchen equipment continued therefore to be profoundly ornamented. Furthermore, the introduction of techniques for mass production, with industrial design substituting artisanship, appeared as incompatible with individual artistry and therefore aesthetic worth. However, the 20th century historians and polemicists of the Modern Movement including Lewis Mumford, Nikolaus Pevsner, Herwin Schaefer and Sigfried Giedion maintained on finding the origins of a new aesthetic in some of the 19th century great achievements in engineering and the applied arts. Throughout the twentieth century, perceptions of the content of the machine-inspired art the machine’s role in society changed so inevitably. Through innovation in representation, artists fragmented and reconstructed the visual world in art in response to seeing the world in new perspectives. The machine, which had been in existence in daily life for a century by 1913, had been the founder and shelter of the modern age, drawing countries together in support and indemnifying human survival. The sense of experience demonstrated in art of the Futurist movement is a development of this sense of safety, displaying the feeling of rapid progression to a state where one could surpass experience. According to the Futurists, this aspiration could be realised through the machine. In his painting, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla (1912) shows the repercussions of this new vision for the world in a strange rendering of speed through the natural bodies of a dog and human. By applying the elements of the train’s dynamism to the dog and its walker, he suggested the same sense of rush and energy as Turners (1844) suggested the speed of a train by its misty composition Rain. The dog and its walker appear in a machine-like black, propelled by some persistent power, which maintains the mystery and significance of Turners’ steam train. Balla’s painting seemed to summarize the notion that the machine has had an unmanageable affect on humanity and the natural world and that it is no longer necessary to express that through representation of the technology itself (Dee, para4s). In their recommendations through art, artists reflected the aspect of transport as an intrinsic part in the removal of man’s perception of himself. The design for the New City by Antonio Sant’ Elia’s (1914) was a surprising vision of the imagined future. His argument was that this architecture for this building must not reproduce any former style, reflecting the state of mind of the futurists. In the Futurist Manifesto of 1913, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s founding statements explained his belief that the body and its needs should shape its environment with the emphasis being on comfort and convenience for man to achieve a state of imperceptibility. He therefore preferred architecture, which was appropriate for all, and transport modes that extended the function of these spaces intermediately. Dee points out that the denial of natural needs supply to the wider experience of the city where innovations in technology allowed for building of numerous power stations supplying the city with more light and permitting urban activities to go on at night. From a Futurist viewpoint, light replaced the need to sleep in the same way that the car and the train removed the need to exercise implying that man should be more machine like. Although the recommendations in the designs for New City and the successive manifestos never strictly translated into daily life, their influences on European art were far reaching. European designers utilized the machine aesthetic in the manufacture of mass produced objects that began to appear in cities’ shops and homes. In, Paris hosted an Art Exposition in 1925 that celebrated the icons of the mechanised world. Here, authorities ostracized the borrowing of aesthetics of machine iconography in to mass culture, arguing that this act diverted from their true meaning. An example of a change that they achieved through this debate was the changing meaning of machine-inspired art. While the Constructivist and Futurist movements applied the figurative qualities of machine to the human, now a focus on the abstract qualities of its aesthetic lent the formal elements of the machine to art objects, which producers produced in masses for sale as luxury objects in department stores. Although art in trade took place in a retail space, there was a struggle to justify mass-produced, machine-made products as art pieces. In America public did not perceive machine-made objects as art, so the act of displaying such objects in a retail space alongside paintings and sculpture went some way toward changing this perception. Various exhibitions served to commercialise art, concurrently emphasising the aesthetic in machine-made products. For instance, the 1934 MoMA exhibition entitled Machine Art had an approach that effectively turned a museum space into a department store and this efficiently expressed the degree to which the modern home had become dependant on these machines. This ultimately boosted sales of machine-made products and strengthened relationships between manufacturers and artists. Through exhibitions, the role of the machine fulfilled an economic, social and artistic function conveying the idea that one can find abstract beauty in the relationship between form and function in the machine or machine made object. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, machine aesthetic hugely influenced design in advertising. Ashley Havinden, the British advertising artist, exhibited this particularly well in the period from 1926 through the design company he belonged to, Crawfords. He broke down the car’s formal elements of chassis and wheels in a series of parallel diagonals forming an abstract machine aesthetic, which emphasised the car’s speed and power (Dee, para10). Although technology has always been inseparable from the development of music, a rapid acceleration took place in the twentieth century when new machine music came into existence. With the appearance of electronic musical instruments, composers sometimes seemed more like sound technicians than like musicians. According to Braun and his co-authors, the relationship of technology and modern music is explicit from advancements such as introduction of Yamaha in development of music in Japan, social construction of the synthesizer and use of player piano as precursor of computer music. It is also evident in the involvement of locomotives, airplanes, violin vibrato and the phonograph in music, growth of independent recording studio and the origins of the 45–RPM record among others. Conclusion Machine-inspired art from the twentieth century has followed the advancement of society but it has also borrowed from preceding interpretations of the machine aesthetic in art. Futurists underwent through a sharp shift in their view of the world, visually through its interpretations in cubism and viscerally through the comprehensive plains of possibility, which the machine age offered. The machine age signified freedom from the limits of previous human experience. In addition, the role of the machine in twentieth century art was a mutual one with manufacturers associating their machine-made products with the artistic movements that had risen out of this trend of machine. Works cited Abele, A.W, How science and technology changed art, (1996). Retrieved 8th April, 2009 from: www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5000423641 Apatoff , D. A heros role awaits the right artist, (2006). Retrieved 8th April, 2009 from: http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/10/heros-role-awaits-right-artist.html Artnet. Machine aesthetic, (2009). Retrieved 8th April, 2009 from: http://www.artnet.com/library/05/0528/T052832.ASP Braun, H.J. et al. Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Retrieved 7th April, 2009 from: http://www.amazon.com/Music-Technology-Twentieth- Century-Hans-Joachim/dp/0801868858 Calter, P. Early Twentieth-Century Geometric Art, (1998). Retrieved 9th April, 2009 from: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit16/unit16.html Dee, S. The Role of the Machine in Twentieth Century Art. Retrieved 7th April, 2009 from: http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_printable.php?id=304 Duchamp, M. The Great Trouble with Art in this Country, (1946). Retrieved 9th April, 2009 from: http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft9h4nb688&chunk.id=d0e27 &toc.id=&brand=eschol Kuspit, D. A Critical History of 20th-Century Art. Retrieved 7th April, 2009 from: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit12-14-05.asp Lambert, L. Naturalizing Technology in Late Nineteenth Century America: An Aesthetic of Excess Meaning in the Paintings of J. Alden Weir. Retrieved 8th April, 2009 from: http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol10/s_special/articles/lambert.php Mahla, M. The dynamisation of art in the 20th century and its impact on typographie, (2000). Retrieved 7th April, 2009 from: http://www.kugelbahn.ch/dynami_e.htm Read More